by Cleo Coyle
“Right.”
“And what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”
Matt shrugged.
I went back to finishing a double-tall mochaccino order: two steaming shots of espresso stirred into a base of my homemade chocolate syrup, a pour of steamed milk, plenty of frothy foam, and a whipped cream cloud as high as Denali. I dusted the ski slope with bittersweet shavings, set the drink on the counter, smiled at the young woman waiting, and turned back to my ex.
“You wouldn’t be avoiding your mother because she’s been chewing your ear off to cancel the wedding, would you?”
Matt massaged his eyes. “Let’s not go there.”
“Well, I wouldn’t blame you. She’s been chewing my ear off about it, too. For months.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay . . .”
I moved back to the espresso machine, unlocked the portafilter handle, dumped the packed cake of grounds into the under-counter garbage, then moved to rinse the filter in the small sink. The mochaccino order appeared to be my last of the evening. Gardner Evans was due to relieve me any minute, and most of the twenty marble-topped café tables were empty, which was typical for a Monday evening in April. The tourists wouldn’t start flowing back into the historic district for at least another month.
“Anyway,” I told Matt, “all of us have enough to do this week to keep us out of trouble. You’ve got your pals flying here from every country of the coffee belt, don’t you?”
“Practically. They’ll be arriving all week, but I’ll see most of them as a group on Thursday.”
“At your mother’s luncheon?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to have a bachelor party with them, too, right?”
“A bachelor party?” Matt snorted. “She would murder me if I had a bachelor party! Didn’t I mention that?”
“She who? Your mother?”
“My bride-to-be.”
“Breanne would murder you? Just for having a bachelor party?”
Matt slipped off his exquisite Armani blazer and laid it carefully on the high bar chair next to him. As he rolled up his sleeves, my gaze drifted up his tanned, sculpted forearms to the open neck of his fashionably tie-free dress shirt.
For as long as I’d known him, Matteo Allegro had been his own man, a hiking-booted, extreme sports-loving explorer. Ever since his involvement with Breanne, however, I swear my ex had been fitted with an invisible collar and leash (compliments of some name designer, of course).
“You want a double, right?” I said, moving back to the espresso machine.
“Single.”
“But you usually have a doppio espresso at this hour.”
“Single. That’s what I want.”
“O-kay,” I said.
I ran the burr grinder, which I’d set up earlier with some very special beans, and wondered if a drink order could be Freudian. “Set me straight here. If ‘what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her’ when it comes to your bedding down upstairs, then why don’t you feel the same way about a bachelor party with your buddies?”
“Because what Breanne doesn’t know will become known if paparazzi take embarrassing photos of the thing and post them on the Net. Or worse, sell them to ‘Gotham Gossip.’ ”
“Oh, I see. So it’s more like what Randall Knox doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”
“Right again.”
Knox was the New York Journal’s new “Gotham Gossip” column editor. I’d never met the man, but Tucker Burton, my actor/playwright assistant manager with an unhealthy appetite for celebrity prattle, had warned me already about the guy’s rep:
“Knox is wired into this town, Clare. They say he has tentacles running around every New York inside track. And when those slithery limbs retract, look out!”
“Look out?” I said. “For what?”
“Bombshells, sweetie. Usually scandalous, always readable!”
“Damn the man,” Matt muttered. “Did you know Breanne has some sort of history with him?”
“History?” I said. “What do you mean, history? Were they lovers?”
“No. Bree says their relationship was professional. That’s all I know. That’s all she’ll tell me. Either way, the prick’s only too happy to publish dirt on her—”
“Or you,” I noted.
Matt shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it . . .”
“What do you mean? Are you talking about that snarky item Knox published on Joy?”
Our daughter had been arrested for a terrible crime a few months back. When the news broke, there was enough dirt to fill ten pages, let alone a single gossip feature. Strangely, however, Randall Knox spent some of those precious column inches pretzeling his report so he could embarrass Breanne, and even Matt, whom he described not as an international coffee broker but as “Breanne Summour’s flavor of the month.”
“It has nothing to do with that item on Joy,” Matt assured me. Then he sighed and ran a hand through his short, dark Caesar. “I don’t want to alarm you or anything—”
Few things alarmed me more than my ex saying, “I don’t want to alarm you.”
“—but Knox has got some photographer trailing me around the city, waiting for me to do something embarrassing. Breanne saw the man stalking me one night. She knows he works for Knox.”
“What?!”
Matt lowered his voice. “It’s one of the reasons I’m bunking with you, if you want to know the truth. This is my place of business, so my being here is nothing unusual. All I have to do at the end of the night is take the back stairs up to the apartment, and I’ll have my privacy.”
“And I thought you were ducking a fat hotel bill.”
“Well, that, too, honestly.”
“So what does this photographer of Knox’s think he’s going to get by following you around?”
Matt sighed. “He snapped me just the other day, picking up a magazine from a newsstand.”
“So?”
“So, it was Maxim.”
I rolled my eyes. “Big deal.”
“I know. It’s ridiculous, right?”
“Your picking up a lads’ magazine is not scandalous behavior. Thousands of men do the same thing every day!”
“I know, but you see my problem, don’t you? I could stay in a hotel, but then some pretty young thing might ask me for directions or the time of day near my room door or the elevators that go up to my room, and bam, a photo’s snapped, a suggestive caption’s written, and my wedding’s off.”
I frowned. “Matt, if you’re really on solid ground with Breanne, one stupid photo in a tabloid shouldn’t change it.”
“Forget it, Clare. You just don’t understand.”
“Apparently not.”
I turned my attention back to pulling Matt’s shot—something I did understand, thank you very much. After dosing and tamping the fragrant black sand into the portafilter, I locked the handle, pressed the Go button, and began to monitor the extraction process. As high-pressure steam released oils from the finely ground beans, I began to feel better. The aromatics were soothing. They were also very different from the caramelized earthiness of our regular house roast. Sweet and light, these very special beans flaunted naked floral notes, and (to my olfactory nerves, anyway) traces of jasmine, honey, and bergamot.
Within twenty-five seconds, the potable perfume was nearly finished oozing out of the machine’s spout, a fine-looking crema topping it off like a perfectly pulled dark beer. I stopped the pull, placed the Village Blend demitasse on its matching saucer, and slid the single shot across the blueberry marble counter.
Matt regarded his shot. “Where’s my lemon twist?”
I smiled. “You won’t need it.”
The espresso method actually wasn’t the best way to serve these particular beans. A French pressed or brewed method would have been better at bringing out the amazing flavor characteristics in the single-origin cherries. (And since we’d finally invested in two $11,000 C
lover machines for the shop, I could have perfectly brewed Matt a single cup.) But I couldn’t resist the surprise factor.
Matt gave me a skeptical look until he sniffed his drink. Then one dark eyebrow rose. “This isn’t our house espresso roast.”
“No.”
He sipped once, and his eyes smiled. “You gave me the Esmeralda?”
“Yep.” For the past week, I’d been in the Blend’s basement, test-roasting the green beans that we’d acquired for Saturday’s wedding. Tonight’s test was the champagne of the coffee world, aka Esmeralda Especial.
I was stunned when Matt was able to secure the auction-lot Esmeralda beans. Although the Peterson family was still selling the most recent crop from their world-famous heirloom geisha trees, the celebrated first-place Panamanian Cup of Excellence microlot was as scarce as a sack of Hope diamonds.
Matt and I had explained this to Breanne, and we planned on purchasing other Esmeralda beans; the ones still available on the market. But the woman pitched a fit, absolutely insisting that we secure the famous, first-prize, $130-a-pound auction-lot beans for her high-profile wedding guests.
“They’ve read about the auction lot beans; they’ve seen the cable stories about it; and that’s what I want my guests drinking. The world-record auction lot. Not sloppy seconds!”
Sloppy seconds? I’d wanted to strangle her. The Esmeralda beans still available were among the highest quality on the planet. They were from the same damn geisha trees as the world-record auction lot, for goodness’ sake; grown on the same damn farm! But Breanne refused to “settle.”
Lucky for us all, Matt had some friends who owed him favors. He made a few calls, and voilá! Two ten-pound bags of the scarce green beans appeared at my doorstep. (And since one pound of coffee yielded approximately forty cups, we now had enough for Breanne’s 350 VIP guests to sample.) Along with the Waipuna farm’s 100 percent Kona Peaberry, the small lot of Kopi Luwak, and our signature espresso drinks, the Village Blend was bound to make an impression, too.
“Nice job on the roast,” Matt said between long, contemplative sips.
“Thanks. I kept it light to preserve the nuances—a no-brainer on the Esmeralda.”
“Aren’t you having any?”
“I cupped it earlier with Dante—” I tipped my head toward my newest barista, a tattooed, shaved-headed, fine arts painter with a penchant for space and ambient music. (He had some of it playing now: a hypnotic, rhythmic electronic pulsing that would have sent me to dreamland if it weren’t for the double espresso I’d consumed before Matt sat down.)
Hearing his name, Dante Silva glanced up from his conversation with the pretty young mochaccino orderer.
“Need anything, boss?” he called.
“No, it’s okay.”
I wasn’t thrilled with Dante calling me “boss,” but it was better than “Ms. Cosi,” which is how he’d repeatedly addressed me when I’d first hired him. Sure, I’d asked him to call me Clare, but despite Dante’s outlaw appearance, the guy had scrupulous manners—no doubt from the same sort of traditional Italian upbringing I’d gotten from my own grandmother. Luckily, our resident slam poetess, Esther Best, held virtually no respect for authority, and her routine, semisarcastic address of me as “boss” had finally loosened up Dante enough to break him of his “Ms. Cosi” habit.
Matt knocked the counter with his knuckles. I glanced back to him.
“You off soon?” he asked.
“Why?”
“I thought you’d like to come with me to the White Horse. Koa Waipuna just got into town, and I’m meeting him for a drink.”
“Sure. I’m sorry I missed him the last time he was here. We can go as soon as Gardner gets here to relieve me.”
Five minutes later, the front door bell jingled, and a long-limbed African American jazz musician with a freshly trimmed goatee strode purposefully across the wood-plank floor.
“Okay, Dante,” called Gardner, waving a hand-labeled CD case. “Enough with your Sominex playlist! I just cut a new fusion mix with my group. Let’s wake things up in here!”
TWO
WALK down almost any of my neighborhood’s narrow, tree-lined streets, and you’ll see three centuries of architectural history, from Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate town houses to early twentieth-century apartment buildings. Almost everyone I know has applauded the saving of these landmarks and cried over the treasures that were lost before the historic district was sanctioned. But no one cried hard enough, it seemed to me, over losing the guts of these places.
While the buildings around the Village Blend were now preserved by law, the businesses inside them weren’t, and every year that ticked by, more of my neighborhood’s legendary establishments folded, their storefronts replaced with the sort of trade you’d find in upscale suburban malls. What made Greenwich Village Greenwich Village was drifting away faster than Al Gore’s ice caps.
That’s the main reason I valued the White Horse. Like my Village Blend, the landmark tavern stubbornly refused to let go of its moorings. Since Welsh poet Dylan Thomas tossed back eighteen fatal shots in its paneled back room fifty years ago, the White Horse has been hyped as the watering hole of literary legends.
True, Norman Mailer used the joint as a second living room, mainly because, as he so graciously put it, “If you invited people to your house, it was not that easy to get rid of them . . .” But I’d also been impressed with the building itself, which was one of the few wood-frame constructions remaining in Manhattan. The ground-level storefront originally housed a bookshop. Then the James Dean Oyster Bar took over the space, and in 1880, the White Horse opened its doors.
For the next five decades or so, the tavern poured whiskey for longshoremen working the nearby West Side docks. Then the Village became a magnet for struggling writers and artists, and bohemians began to gather there. Today’s clientele lived a lot farther up the socioeconomic ladder.
With NYU now owning half the real estate in my picturesque Village, the college crowd was constantly ringing the bar’s register. Pub-crawling tourists frequented the place, too, along with well-paid or well-subsidized neighborhood regulars who craved good burgers, great onion rings, and ice-cold beers. (Local real estate being what it was, authentically bohemian writers had long ago retrenched in other neighborhoods, but sometimes even they returned to the tavern, drawn by the legends as much as the tourists.)
This evening, the century-old tavern looked as casually inviting as ever with its upper stories painted summer-sky blue and its stately white horse chess-piece emblems stenciled above the tall front windows.
The manager had gamely put out the café umbrellas, but April was still early in the season for sidewalk seating, and only one of the wooden picnic tables was occupied, despite the mild spring weather.
After an easy stroll under Hudson’s glowing streetlamps, Matt and I entered the softly lit front room to find Koa Waipuna sitting at the magnificent mirror-backed mahogany bar (the original one, circa the nineteenth century). I hadn’t seen Koa in years, but there was no way to miss the man. He was big. And exotic didn’t begin to describe him.
Along with his name, Koa had inherited his deep olive complexion and black, expressive eyes from his native Hawaiian father. His frame was heavily muscled, yet he had the delicate facial structure of his Japanese mother. Fluent in Japanese as well as his native Hawaiian, he still wore his long black hair in a samurai-style topknot, an offbeat crowning to preppie khakis, an aquamarine Izod, and polished loafers.
Koa spotted Matt first and grinned. Then he shifted his gaze to me.
“Clare!” He stood and wrapped his beefy arms around me in an enthusiastic hug only slightly less forceful than a boa constrictor’s. “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight!”
I’d visited the Waipunas’ farm only once in my life, years earlier, when Matteo converted a Kona buying trip into our hastily planned but spectacularly romantic Hawaiian honeymoon. Back then, Koa had been a wild young teenager who re
fused to wear a shirt, bristled at farm work, and was constantly surrounded by his five giggling sisters. Today he was in his thirties, married with children, and responsible for the coffee farm’s day-to-day operations. He was serious as a heart attack, according to Matt, until he set foot off the estate. Then his wild streak returned with a vengeance.
“Come with me,” Koa said. Grinning wide, he led us toward the bar’s back room. “The gang’s all here.”
Matt shot Koa a confused look. “The gang? What gang?”
“Oh, uh . . . I just meant that I brought Mr. Koto and Mr. Takahashi along. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” Matt said. “I haven’t seen Junro since my trip to Malaysia last year.”
Matt had mentioned that Koa was working on a business deal with a Japanese company—a plan to host special tours of his estate since Kona-drinking had become pretty popular in Japan.
I was about to ask Koa about it, but I never got the chance. He opened a thin wooden door, and a dozen male voices shouted Matt’s name. That’s when I saw the hanging banner:
BON VOYAGE BACHELORHOOD!
Clipped to the banner was the poster of a blown-up photo, obviously doctored. Matt was on all fours with a ball and chain on his foot and a rope around his neck; his beautiful bride-to-be was dressed to the nines in a floor-length burgundy gown, dripping in diamonds, holding one end of Matt’s rope like a pet leash.
“Surprised?” Koa yelled over the din.
“Am I ever,” Matt replied.
Oh, God. I could see the muscles in Matt’s face had frozen. He’d gone slightly pale, and sweat was starting to bead his upper lip. He glanced at me and then behind him, clearly in a panic about Randall Knox’s stalking gossip column photographer.
I looked behind us, but there were no paparazzi in sight. Then I glanced around the crowded party room. Apart from the embarrassing poster of Matt and Breanne, there was nothing here to warrant tabloid scandal. Sure, Matt’s friends had gotten a good head start on the consumption of alcohol. But it was a tavern, after all.
Two of Matt’s buddies thrust a mug of beer into his hand, pounded his back, and led him farther into the back room—the same one where Dylan Thomas purportedly drank himself to death (not a good omen).